Note 23 — Chapter V · THE BLACK ART.
Reading edition
Another witch was bargaining with a man for some sugar-cane. She seized one end of the stalk and the purchaser the other. A scuffle ensued, and a soldier came up and cut the cane in two with a sword. Immediately a quantity of blood flowed from the cane to the ground, which the witch had been drawing through it from the man’s body. So we read of the two witches in the Italian tale, who “seeing that he would not go, cast him by their witchcraft into a deep sleep, and with a small tube sucked all his blood from his veins, and made it into a blood pudding which they carried with them. And this gave them the power to be invisible till they should return.”23